The Black Death Summary

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The book that I chose to read was The Black Death: Natural and Human Disaster in Medieval Europe by Robert S. Gottfried. This book explained the cause and consequences ok the plague that spread across medieval Europe from the years 1347-1351. When I was younger, I remember learning about the “Black Plague”, but I didn’t realize how devastating it really was until I read this book. To really understand how bad the plague actually was and still is today, we need to look at how the plague spreads so easily and what the causative agent is. The Black Death was a combination of bubonic, pneumonic, and septicaemic plague strains. The plague is a dealy infectious disease cause by the enterobacteria Yersinia pestis. It is primarily carried by rodents,…show more content…
We need to start looking at the environment that people lived in. In medieval Europe, the towns were usually far apart from each other. They were usually located by the seas or rivers. According to reports that were made back then, 9 out of 10 Europeans lived in small settlements, usually 15-20 miles apart from one another. Even though they lived in small but isolated communities, most people lived very close together and had little privacy. Surrounding these villages were fields, pastures and woodlands. Since people lived so close to each other and to animals, the spread of diseases was fairly easy. One statistic I found absolutely amazing and disgusting at the same time was the number of diseases that animals share with people: Humans share 65 different diseases with dogs, 50 with cattle, 46 with sheep and goats, 42 with pigs, 35 with horses, 32 with rats and mice, and 26 with poultry. These diseases, while not as common as respiratory and enteric diseases, are usually more lethal since most viruses and bacteria’s gain virulence as they pass through chains of hosts. Some scholars suggest that civilization and disease travel hand-in-hand, meaning that the incidence of epidemic patterns depend on patterns of human settlement. But this theory is not necessarily the case with diseases from animal hosts. These diseases are usually the result of climate changes and insect and rodent population…show more content…
There are so many different figures from back then and even know that we will never truly understand how devastating it actually was, these figures give us somewhat of an idea of how life was like in the time of the plague. Because of the lack of privacy and healthcare in small towns and in big cities, it hurt the world that much more because people and animals were so close to each other. I honestly could have wrote about so much more information that was in this entire book, but I feel that it is the most important to know about what the Black Death actually was and exactly what the disease did to the people back then. The plague changed medieval society in so many ways, from religious views, town and city life, and even artwork, it shaped what the world is today, even though it was such a terrible
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